It was an extremely ill-considered day, wet fog drawn3 up to the high shouldering roofs and shrugged4 off, like a nervous woman's shawl. But whether it sulked over his departure or smiled on him for remembrance, would not have made any difference to Peter, who, whatever the papers said of the reason for his going abroad, knew that there would be neither shade nor shine for him, nor principalities nor powers until he had found again the House of the Shining Walls. As soon as he had bestowed5 his belongings6 in his stateroom, he went out on the side of the deck farthest from the groups of leave-taking, and stood staring down, as if he considered whether the straightest route might not lie in that direction, into the greasy7, shallow hollows of the harbour water, at the very moment when the Burton Hendersons, over their very late coffee, had discovered the item of his departure.
Mrs. Henderson balanced her spoon on the edge of her cup while her husband read the paragraph aloud to her.
"You don't suppose," she said, as if it might be an interesting even if regrettable possibility,[Pg 177] "that I—that our affair—had anything to do with it?"
"If it did," admitted her husband, with the air of not thinking it likely, but probably served him right, "it has taken a long time to get at him. Two years, isn't it, since you threw him over for a better man?"
"Oh, I'm not so sure of your being a better man, Bertie; I liked you better——"
"I don't believe Weatheral appreciated the distinction. Men like that have a sort of money crust that prevents the ordinary perceptions from getting through to them." This illustration appeared on second thoughts so illuminating9 that it carried him a little further. "Perhaps that's the reason it has taken him so long to tumble after he has been hit; it has just got through to him. It would be interesting to know, though, if he is still a little in love with you."
There was a fair amount of speculation10 in Mr. Burton Henderson's tone that did not appear to have its seat in any apprehension11.[Pg 178]
"Just as if you rather hoped it," his wife protested.
"Well, I was only wondering if his health is so bad as the papers say—it seldom is, you know—but if he were to go off all of a sudden one of these days, whether he mightn't take it into his head now to leave you a legacy12."
"I don't believe it was personal enough with Peter for that. It wasn't me he wanted so much as just to be married. And, besides, I did come down on him rather hard." Mrs. Burton Henderson smiled a little reminiscently as if she still saw herself in the process of coming down on Peter and thought rather well of it.
"Well, anyway," her husband finished, "we could have managed with a legacy."
"Yes, we do need money dreadfully, don't we, Bertie?" she sighed. "But I don't believe I had anything to do with it."
That was all very well for Mrs. Burton Henderson, but Peter's sister Ellen had a different opinion. "Peter," she had said the evening after Peter had sent his trunk out of the house and locked up his suitcase to keep her from putting anything more into it, "you're not[Pg 179] thinking of her, are you? You're not going to take that abroad with you."
"No, Ellen, I haven't thought of her for a long time except to wish her happiness. You mustn't let that worry you."
"Just the same," said Ellen, "if anything happens to you over there—if you never come back to me, I shall never forgive her."
"I shall come back. I am sorry you should feel so bitter about it."
He could not, especially now that it was gone, very well explain to Ellen about the House; for all the years that it had stood there just beyond the edge of dreams with the garden spread around it and a lovely wood before, she had never heard of it. There had been so many ways to it once, paths to it began in pictures, great towered gates of music gave upon its avenues, and if he had not spoken of it, it was because as he had made himself believe when she did come, that Eunice Goodward would come into it of first right. He could not have blamed her for not wishing to live in it—from the first he had never blamed her. He might have managed even had she pulled it about his[Pg 180] ears to rebuild it in some fashion, but this was the bitterest, that he knew now for a certainty there had never been any House and the certainty made him ridiculous.
It had been rather the worse that, with all the suddenness of this discovery, he had not been able to avoid the habit of setting out for it, seeking in dreams the relief of desolation in knowing that no dreams could come. As often as he heard music or saw in the soft turn of a cheek or the slender line of a wrist, what had moved him so in hers he felt himself urged forward on old trails, only to be scared from them by the apparition13 of himself as Eunice had evoked14 it from her bright surpassing surfaces, as a man unaccomplished in passion, unprovocative. All the gates to the House opened upon dreadful hollows of self-despising into which Peter fell and floundered, so that he took to going that way as little as possible, taking wide circuits about it continually in the way of business, being rather pleased with himself when at the end of two years he could no longer feel any pang15 of loss nor any remembering thrill of what the House had been—until he discovered that also[Pg 181] he could not feel some other things, the pen between his fingers and the rise of the stairs under him. He forgot Eunice Goodward, and then one day he forgot to go home after office hours, and they found him sitting still at his desk in the dark, trying to remember whether he ought to put down the blotting-pad and the paper weight on top of that, or if, on the whole, it were not better to put the paper weight, as being the heavier article, first.
It was after that the doctor told him to go as far away from his business as possible and keep on staying away.
"But if I am going to die, doctor," Peter carefully explained, "I would much rather do it in my own country."
"Ah," the doctor warned him, "that's just the difficulty. You won't die."
And that was how Peter happened to be leaning over the forward rail of an Atlantic steamer on his way to Italy, which he had chosen because the date of sailing happened to be convenient. But he knew, as he stood looking down at the surface of the water, rough-hewn by the wind, that whatever the doctor said to[Pg 182] Lessing, or Ellen surmised16, he would get no good there except as it showed him the way to the House of the Shining Walls.
He did not remember where in the blind pointless ring through which the steamer chugged and wallowed as though it were a superior sort of water beetle17 and the horizon a circle of its own making, he began to get sufficiently18 acquainted with his fellow passengers, to understand that they were most of them going abroad in the interest of unrealized estates, and abounded19 in confidence. To see them forever forward and agaze at the lit shores of Spain and the Islands of Desire, roused in him the faint savour of expectation. Which, however, did not prevent him from finding Naples squalid, and Rome, where he arrived in the middle of the tourist season, too modern in a cheap, second-rate sort of way. He could remember when Rome had furnished some excellent company for the House, and suffered in the places of renown20 an indeterminable pang like the ache of an amputated stump21. It seemed, on occasion, as if the old trails might lie down the hollow of the Forum22, under the arch of that broken aqueduct,[Pg 183] beside the dark Volsinian mere1; but when Peter arrived at any of these places he found them prepossessed by Germans gabbling out of Baedekers. The Sistine Chapel23 made the back of his neck ache and he came no nearer than seven tourists to the noble quietude of the Vatican can marbles.
"I must remember," said Peter to himself, "that I am a very sick man, and crowds annoy me."
Then he went into the country and saw the gray of the olives above the springing grass, like the silver bloom on a green plum, and began to experience the pangs24 of recovery. He found Hadrian's Villa25 and the garden of the Villa d'Este, and remembered other things. He remembered the flat malachite-coloured pools, the definite, pointed26 cypresses27 and the fountain's soft incessant28 rain—as it had been in the House. As it was in the House. For he understood in Italy what was still the most bitter to know, that though it might yet be somewhere in the world, he was never to find it any more. Toward all that once had led him thither29, his sense was locked and sealed. He[Pg 184] remembered Eunice Goodward—the fact of her—how tall she was as she walked beside him—but not how at the soft brushing of her hair as she turned, his blood had sung to her; nor all the weeks of their engagement like a morning full of wings. And he could not yet recall so much as the bare reasons for her break with him except that they had been unhappy ones.
It had been a part of a long plan that he and Eunice should have seen Italy together, but for the moment he did not wish her there. He was sure she would have been in the way of his getting something that glimmered30 at him from the coign of castellated walls all awash about their base with purpled shadow, that strove to say itself in intricate fine tracery of tower and shrine31, and failed and fell away before the sodden32 quality of his mind.
So he drifted northward33 with the spring, and saw the anemones34 blowing and the bloomy violet wonder the world, suffering incredible aching intimations of the recrudescence of desire. Afterward35 he came to Florence, where he had heard there were pictures, and hoped to have some peace; but at Florence they were all too[Pg 185] busy being painted or prayed to, the remote Madonnas, the wounded Saints, the comfortable plump Venuses; the lean Christs too stupefied with candle smoke to take any account of an American gentleman in a plain business suit, who looked homely36 and ill and competent. Sometimes in Santa Croce or in the long gallery over the bridge, the noise of the city would remove from him and the faces would waver and lean out of their frames, as if, had the occasion allowed, they would have said the word to set him on his way. But there was always a guard about or a tourist stalking some uncatalogued prey37 and it never came to anything.
"What you really want," said a man at his hotel to whom he had half whimsically complained of their inarticulateness—one of those remarkable38 individuals who had done nothing so successfully in so many cities of Europe that he was supposed to know the exact month for doing it most delightfully39 in any one of them—"what you really want is Venice. It's an off season there; you'll meet nobody but Germans, and if you go about in your own gondola40 you needn't mind them."[Pg 186]
So Peter went to Venice, and on the way there he met the Girl from Home.
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1
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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exigencies
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| n.急切需要 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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bestowed
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| 赠给，授予( bestow的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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belongings
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| n.私人物品，私人财物 | |
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7
greasy
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| adj. 多脂的，油脂的 | |
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8
amendment
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| n.改正，修正，改善，修正案 | |
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9
illuminating
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| a.富于启发性的，有助阐明的 | |
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10
speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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11
apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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12
legacy
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| n.遗产，遗赠；先人(或过去)留下的东西 | |
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apparition
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| n.幽灵，神奇的现象 | |
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evoked
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| [医]诱发的 | |
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pang
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| n.剧痛，悲痛，苦闷 | |
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16
surmised
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| v.臆测，推断( surmise的过去式和过去分词 )；揣测；猜想 | |
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17
beetle
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| n.甲虫，近视眼的人 | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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abounded
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| v.大量存在，充满，富于( abound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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renown
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| n.声誉，名望 | |
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stump
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| n.残株，烟蒂，讲演台；v.砍断，蹒跚而走 | |
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forum
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| n.论坛，讨论会 | |
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chapel
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| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
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pangs
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| 突然的剧痛( pang的名词复数 )； 悲痛 | |
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villa
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| n.别墅，城郊小屋 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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cypresses
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| n.柏属植物，柏树( cypress的名词复数 ) | |
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incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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thither
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| adv.向那里；adj.在那边的，对岸的 | |
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glimmered
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| v.发闪光，发微光( glimmer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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sodden
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| adj.浑身湿透的；v.使浸透；使呆头呆脑 | |
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northward
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| adv.向北；n.北方的地区 | |
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anemones
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| n.银莲花( anemone的名词复数 )；海葵 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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38
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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delightfully
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| 大喜，欣然 | |
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gondola
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| n.威尼斯的平底轻舟；飞船的吊船 | |
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